Selling my audio tours through my own website

Hi all. I’m hoping for any advice on selling my audio tours through my own website please. I’ve been reading this forum ‘Promoting and selling VoiceMap tours’ and there’s some useful stuff in here, although some of it looks a few years old now so may not be the best advice now.

Getting people to visit my website and find the page selling my audio tours is one issue, but then what is the best way to accept payment and send the tour codes? On the forum there is reference to using things like Fareharbor or a WordPress plugin (WooCommerce) or Giftup. Does anyone use these or anything similar and have any feedback please? Are they easy to set up and use? Do they cost much? I know PayPal has an option to redirect a customer to a specific webpage upon purchase, I already use that in another part of my website so they can access what they have purchased. It seems to work well but I think my PayPal account only allows me to set up one such redirection.

I think an immediate automatic response to purchasers with the code would be good but it looks like some do it manually, eg send an email with the code within a certain time. This might also need the option to purchase through VoiceMap at a higher cost if they need it immediately. Any thoughts on this method please? Obviously more demanding in responding to purchasers.

Thanks, Martin Wilson

The two most common approaches to this are Fareharbor and Woocommerce @mart. There’s a fairly detailed explanation of how you can use Fareharbor here and you’ll find costs on their website, but there isn’t much info about Woocommerce on the forum. Did you make progress on using this @jerry3061?

Are you planning to sell on your own website at a discount? Nobody has done this before unless it was a time-limited discount, and I don’t think it looks good when you advertise your tour as more expensive when purchased through us.

I have dedicated pages for my guides on my sites. Here is the Ronda one. The VoiceMap GPS Audio Guide for Ronda - Ronda Today

It directs to VoiceMap for more info and purchasing plus I have some script on there from Travel Payouts that directs to the relevant Viator page automatically…

It seems to me that the payment gateways are taken care of and I know that FH have been causing some stress lately by increasing handling charges to many customers so I think to promote from a third part site like ours, the best way to go is direct buyers to VoiceMap where they get taken care of pretty well?

One thing would be good. @iain … Is there a way to see how much traffic goes to VoiceMap from my dedicated audio guide pages? Track the sales to see if they are converting?. My Ronda guide page gets over a thousand impressions a month and a minimum of 50 clicks, users, sessions etc.

I guess that your idea @mart is to sell the guide at a reduced rate with some kind of offer or loyalty scheme?

Be interested to hear more from others.

Thanks @clive. Yes similar to you I have a dedicated page on my website which directs to VoiceMap for more info and purchasing Audio Drives | Lake District Drives

I have no problem with that method, it seems to work very well and VoiceMap are clearly more than capable of handling customers and payments etc. I’m just investigating if I can sell vouchers through my website instead, probably to see if I can make more money that way.

I was asking about offering discounts and have found others who do that, but appreciate as @iain says this might prove contentious so I would probably look to sell at full price or just below through my website.

Hi @mart , Your drives look really good! I am thinking of doing one or two for my area here in Andalucia so seeing yours has inspired me to get on with it soon!

Have you thought about offering the tours to hotels and guest houses along the route and especially at the start point? You could offer them packs of ten vouchers at a discount for example and they could re sell to their guests or even build the audio guided drive into their room package deal.

Maybe even the tourist office close to the start point would resell for you. Just have to agree a price and send them the vouchers as and when they need them.

That way you cut out all the issues of selling your self online and payment gateways etc etc…